I didn't weight this skin so I am not sure of the actual TF. I just used by typical 1/8" setting on my sheeter, but kept it 1 tooth on the thicker side. If you had to guess I would say 3/16" is about right.

Tonight I finally baked a pie made with all the ingredients listed on the bag by several posters here. A friendly chemistry major supplied me with some laboratory grade (not fertilizer grade!) ammonium sulfate. I again went for the gusto, putting in 1/3 teaspoon to a pound of flour and the usual other ingredients. I did use fresh yeast, so will repeat the experiment with other yeasts. The product behaved as a dough conditioner. The first thing I noticed in the bread machine while mixing the dough is the dough became slack. Then, the dough would not rise at room temperature and there was no gas in the plastic bag. Not much else happened after being in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Letting it come to room temperature, the dough was very slack and rolled out very easily.

While baking it there was no THAT SMELL(TM)*. The dough came out limp; the slices did not stick straight out while holding the slices.

I overdosed to see what would happen. Next time I will try within the recommended range.

I have been spending some time studying the efforts of people seeking to determine what causes the stink in Subway hero breads while it is baking. Some of these people live in an apartment above a Subway sandwich shop and complain this stink gets into their clothes. When was the last time someone complained of smell getting into ones clothes from a French bakery downstairs run by a guy just off the plane from Paris? This mental exercise may lend some insight into Shakey's smell.

The secrets of the old Shakey's in Rockville, MD will soon be concreted over. A new restaurant, with a larger footprint than the Shakey's it replaces, has the walls going up, though there still is dirt in the center of the structure.

Is that the original store? Sad to see these icons get plowed and re-developed. When I was in Palo Alto, CA a while back we drove by one of the original Round Table stores. Alas it was redeveloped into condos.

No, Rockville, Maryland was not the original store. However, it was where thread contributor Lightmeter used to work. According to Lightmeter, that store was one of the highest grossing stores in the chain. There are also a lot of references on the web to that particular location, though there were a dozen or so stores in the metropolitan Washington, DC area at the chain's peak.

The original Shakey's was at 5641 J Street in Sacramento, California. I was there once in the mid-80's. They still had a jazz band performing that day.

The website of the current restaurant on the site:http://www.clarkscornerbar.com/I don't know how much of the structure is original. There was a fire on the site which led to the closure of that particular Shakeys.

I have been spending some time studying the efforts of people seeking to determine what causes the stink in Subway hero breads while it is baking. Some of these people live in an apartment above a Subway sandwich shop and complain this stink gets into their clothes.

When I was out walking all over New England (350 miles) last fall, living out of a backpack, I would regularly stop at Subway to fill my water bottle with ice. As a result, my water bottle often had that smell, and the water tasted of that smell. I got really sick of it, but I had to deal with it because in a lot of small towns Subway is the only place you can easily get water.

Greetings, Sorry for the long absence. Work and life got in the way again...

After reviewing the more recent Shakey's threads I note "That Smell" is still an elusive ingredient. It seems DNA Dan went down a couple paths exploring various yeasts and some sort of vermont cheese powder.

Have you tried validating that the smell/taste is simply a shaker cheese mix dusted on top of the mozz cheese blend, just before putting it into the oven (I still think this is the elusive aroma)?

If you already did and posted about it, I'm sorry I missed it, but I'd be interested in your results. I recomnmend store bought Kraft "Shredded Parmesan, Romano and Asiago Cheeses" with the built in shaker lid. It smells close to me.

Greetings, Sorry for the long absence. Work and life got in the way again...

After reviewing the more recent Shakey's threads I note "That Smell" is still an elusive ingredient. It seems DNA Dan went down a couple paths exploring various yeasts and some sort of vermont cheese powder.Lightmeter

My last pie was a 4-day ferment with the Tones Garlic Romano Sprinkle. Details in post #99 here: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,13389.80.html This produced a fantastic pie! Perhaps my favorite at this point. The smell lingered in my garage for about 3-4 days. I'm convinced it's not the yeast but an additive in the dough, perhaps combined with a long ferment. It could be that the long ferment is substituting for some tastes in the "additive" that the Garlic Romano Sprinkle does not provide. This pie smelled fantastic cooking. Shakey's? Not quite sure because I need to recalibrate my Shakey's smell this spring by making a trip to Spokane. However in researching "that smell" this is where I would focus your efforts. It's not some magical yeast.

I don't know how long that information will remain up. It is a post by Mr. Hal Laurent dated February 1, 2008. In it, he states:"The thin crust was indeed good. The dough was made from a mix of high-gluten and regular flour. I wish I had paid more attention and could remember the ratio, but it was definitely less high-gluten than regular.

And the cheese mix was mostly mozzarella, with smaller amounts of cheddar and provolone."

That store was one of the last to close in the east. I ate there a few times. It was in the same general region as the one that Lightmeter worked in. This is the first time I heard of a blend of flours being used to make thin crust dough. Maybe the franchisee did it to get by with less inventory, as that "regular" flour may have also been used as dusting flour. It is just one more piece of information to indicate that something like a bread flour was and still is being used.

My blends of foodservice mozzarella, cheddar and provolone available on the east coast in a 80/10/10 ratio do not resemble the cheese on current pizzas from corporate locations in California.

It evoked a lot of nostalgic flavor that I haven't come across before.

I also found that using a saltier mozz. heightens it even further. I used a Mexican Oaxaca cheese cheese. It's like a cross between Monterrey Jack with with a Mozzarella, it has string cheese texture before cooking. The brand I used didn't completely have the right melting texture (a tad bit too creamy vs. stretchy) but the saltiness really took me back.

[/color]The process has remained remarkably straightforward. Red and white wheat from the Central Valley pours down chutes into rollers that crush it. That material gets sifted out into coarser or finer sizes.[/size][/color]Whole-wheat flour, which includes the brownish bran, gets a coarser sift. The traditional bleached white flour, however, is much finer and goes through several processing phases to bring it to the soft powder that either pours into sacks loaded onto pallets or goes into a bulk tank, ready to be dumped into semi-trucks.[/size][/color]Some of the smaller sacks make their way to local grocery stores R-N Market and Cost Less Foods.[/size][/color][/size]

If I'm remembering correctly at least one of these was a winter wheat.

Most varieties grown in California are genetically spring wheat varieties, i.e. do not require vernalization, however because the majority of California wheat-growing regions have very mild winter temperatures, spring wheat can be sown in the fall or early winter. Since market classifications typically refer to the season of production, not growth habit, California's red wheat production is referred to as Hard Red Winter wheat.

In California, spring wheat is planted in the fall and harvested the following year. The Federal Grain Inspection Service grades this wheat as hard red spring wheat if sold outside the state, unless it is sold "identity preserved."

Logged

The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.They say he acquired his size from eating too much pi.

Good sleuthing once again. Given the comments that Zing's discovery said (combination of a regular flour [all-puprose ?] and a high-gluten flour, with emphasis on the regular flour) I suspect your good old Harvest King/Better for Bread from General Mills or the Pendleton Mills Mondako flour would be the best choices to try in replicating a Shakey's crust. Both HK and Mondako are 12% protein/flours, which puts them above typical all-purpose flours that run 10-11%. Of course, one could try to mix an all-purpose and high-gluten flour to attempt a more pure replication, but that requires too much math for my aging brain , and we still do not know which brands of those flours the Shakey's of old would have used.

I think one part of it is needing a more finely ground flour. The other is getting the correct spring wheat from California that's labeled as Red Winter. As of right now, I don't know if that's going to be all that easy.

I think "very vintage" Shakey's was confirmed as using Washburn flour. Long ago that was also grown and milled in Cali somewhere around Sacramento, I think.

I think the varieties grown there were both the Harvest King (the wheat variety, not the flour) and Red Turkey and since then there was crossing breeding of the two. Both of those are Spring Wheat.

Logged

The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.They say he acquired his size from eating too much pi.

I think I left out that all the other cooks who worked at Shakey's in the old days did not report using a blend of two flours. But only a few ever mentioned the brand of commercial flour being used before going to premix. I have also noted numerous times that different Shakey's used different brands/types of products.

The main reason for trying to replicate modern Shakey's is because I am able to get samples to bang my clones up against.